VMware now wants to be a player in the IT world. They want people to view it as more than simply an important middleware cloud software provider. VMware’s ESX cloud server and vSphere management platform certainly have become pervasive in the data center, despite intense competition from Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

VMware released a new version of its main product, vSphere 4.1, on July 13, about 14 months after vSphere 4 started shipping; VMware hadn’t updated the platform for three years prior to Version 4. It also lowered its prices to attract more midrange and smaller businesses.

“A year ago, when we shipped vSphere [4.0], we talked about vSphere being a foundation for the cloud. At that time, a lot of the industry was equating the cloud [only] to services provided by Google services and Amazon services on line,” Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of Virtualization and Cloud Platforms, told eWEEK.

“Back then, we viewed vSphere as sort of industrial architecture for IT. We saw that IT has moved from mainframes to client/server and to the Web; cloud is the next thing. Now we’re beginning Internet-scale deployments and starting to build clouds in the data center — private clouds. Just over the course of the last 12 months, we have seen this become a reality.”